A 2,700-year-old engraving on the walls of an Assyrian palace may be our oldest glimpse into the ancient city of Jerusalem and provide another perspective on a Biblical story of how a Judean king interacted with one of the most powerful empires in the Middle East.
In a new study, Stephen Compton, an expert in Near Eastern archaeology, argues just that, pointing to a relief from the throne room of Sennacherib, king of the Assyrian Empire. According to Compton, the relief, known as slab 28, depicts Sennacherib’s army outside the walls of Jerusalem, with King Hezekiah of Judah standing atop a tower.
But how did a Judean king end up in the throne room of an empire?
Caught in the middle: Israel and Judea vs. Assyria
In the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, Assyria was the superpower in the Near East, ruling an empire that stretched from Egypt in the southwest to parts of modern-day Turkey in the north and all the way eastward to parts of modern-day Iran.
A map of the Assyrian Empire. (Photo by: Péter Gulyás, derivative work of maps by Rowanwindwhistler and Renato de carvalho Ferreira via Wikimedia Commons)
Assyria didn’t start out that big, though. It took years of conquest to get there. Initially, the Assyrian Empire was primarily based in parts of modern-day Syria and Iraq. Right when it started to expand, another central kingdom was also vying for regional power: Egypt. What’s smack in the middle between Egypt and Syria? The Land of Israel.
At the time, the Jewish people were split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. As Assyria and Egypt faced off, the two kingdoms were forced to choose: would they side with Egypt to the south or Assyria to the north?
Ultimately, both kingdoms decided to side with Egypt.
The Tanakh (the Jewish Bible) records the interactions between the Israelites and the Assyrians in 2 Kings (Chapters 15-19), the Book of Isaiah (36-37), and Chronicles II (32). According to the Tanakh, after the Israelites decided to ally with the Egyptians, the Assyrian King Shalmaneser swept through the northern kingdom of Israel, carrying out mass deportations and massacres. Ten of the 12 Tribes of Israel were lost from that moment on.
King Sennacherib, Shalmaneser’s nephew, then moved on to Judah, taking over a series of towns. The king of Judah, Hezekiah, gave a massive tribute payment to hold Sennacherib off. But that wasn’t enough.
The Assyrian king descended on Jerusalem, surrounding the city and implementing a brutal siege. Hezekiah was prepared, fortifying the city walls and digging a tunnel to a nearby water source to keep the city from running dry. Those protections would only last so long, though, and Hezekiah feared the worst, praying for a miracle.
Shortly afterward, according to both the Tanakh and Assyrian records, Sennacherib retreated from Jerusalem without entering the city. The Tanakh says that God sent an angel to kill the Assyrian soldiers, forcing him to flee. The Assyrian records say that Sennacherib “confined him (Hezekiah) inside the city Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage.” Sennacherib proceeded to boast that Hezekiah sent him a large tribute afterwards.
Assyria’s record of the Biblical story
The Assyrian records of this story are inscribed on a series of clay prisms from the 7th century BCE, all of which record the same account of Sennacherib’s military campaigns against kingdoms throughout the region. Those campaigns are also recorded in a series of reliefs on walls around Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh.
The Taylor Prism from the Neo-Assyrian empire tells the story of king Sennacherib’s third campaign and includes descriptions of his conquests in Judah, some of which are described from another point of view in the old testament of the Bible. (Photo by David Castor via Wikimedia Commons)
British archaeologist Sir Austin Henry Layard first excavated the palace in the 1840s. He identified some of the reliefs in the palace as showing Sennacherib’s conquest of the Judean city of Lachish and several other cities. For decades, experts have debated what exact events were depicted in the other reliefs, with the invasions of Tyre, Jaffa, Ushu, and other cities all raised as possibilities.
These ruins are ancient, though, so they aren’t the easiest to interpret, especially since some of the slabs are missing or heavily damaged. To examine the slabs that survived, Compton compared the pictures to historical, architectural, and geographical information about the various places the Assyrians conquered.
In his new study, Compton focused on one of the walls in Sennacherib’s throne room, arguing that the first slab on this wall depicts the Assyrian king’s conquest of the Phoenician city of Ushu. Based on that, he posits that the following panels covered the rest of Sennacherib’s third military campaign, which went through the Phoenician, Philistine, and Judean kingdoms in chronological order.
According to Compton’s theory, the next recorded relief, slab 24, depicted the battle between Assyria and Egypt near Eltekeh, a Philistine city likely near modern-day Rehovot. After that came a series of reliefs showing the Assyrian army in motion, followed by a relief, known as slab 28, depicting the army before a walled city.
While some scholars identify that city as Eltekeh, Compton disagrees for a few reasons.
Firstly, Eltekeh is typically identified as a small city located at a site known today as Tel Shalaf. However, the city portrayed in slab 28 is large and has multiple gates. In slab 24, however, a small city is depicted in the background on a hill, which aligns more closely with what we know of Eltekeh. Sennacherib also writes that he pillaged Eltekeh, but the city in slab 28 is unharmed.
There was one city Sennacherib famously didn’t record pillaging: Jerusalem. This was Sennacherib’s last target in the depicted military campaign, so Compton argues that if the campaign were engraved in chronological order, then the first two slabs would depict the first two kingdoms he invaded. The third would depict the last kingdom he struck.
Slab 28 also aligns with Sennacherib’s record of the siege of Jerusalem. A single man is depicted standing on the walls of the city, which may be Hezekiah, whom Sennacherib said he “confined…inside the city Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage.” The man is also carrying a standard, a sort of banner, instead of a weapon. Standards in Assyrian texts were usually associated with kings, Compton writes, suggesting that the man in the relief is a king.
A zoomed in capture of a pencil drawing of slab 28 from the wall of Sennacherib’s throne room. The figure identified as King Hezekiah by Compton is marked by a red arrow. (Original photo of pencil drawing by The Trustees of the British Museum)
The Assyrians also typically depicted foreign cities being conquered in their engravings, but in this slab, the Assyrian army is shown departing with their backs to the walls, and the city remains intact.
History professor Christoph Uehlinger was the first to posit in 2003 that slab 28 could depict Jerusalem. He concluded, however, that the existing evidence he had at the time could “neither prove nor exclude the possibility that the siege of Jerusalem was depicted on one of Sennacherib’s palace reliefs.”
Compton argued that since he was able to more conclusively identify the city in the first slab in the throne room as Ushu and the city in the background of the second slab as Eltekeh, there was now a new context to support the identification of slab 28 as a depiction of Jerusalem.
Another unusual sign is that the palace or citadel in slab 28 is separated from the foreground by a horizontal line, making it clear that it’s on a separate ground level from the other buildings in the photo. Compton notes that this is the only example of a city being split across two ground levels in known Assyrian reliefs.
Jerusalem at the time was unusual due to its layout over several divided hills. The city originated in what is known today as the City of David, south of the Temple Mount. From there, it expanded to the Temple Mount, with the space between the Mount and the City of David serving as the city’s administrative center, where palaces and government buildings were located. It also expanded to another nearby hill to the southwest of the Temple Mount.
A model at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem of Jerusalem at the end of the days of the First Temple – the days of King Hezekiah – below is the City of David and above it is the Upper City – surrounded by a wall. The wall likely seen in the engraving in Sennacherib’s throne room is pointed out by a red arrow. (Photo by: Shlomo Roded via the PikiWiki – Israel free image collection project via Wikimedia Commons)
The entire city of Jerusalem was surrounded by deep valleys, except on its northern side, on the northern hill of the city. The Book of Isaiah describes the Assyrian army as stationed on the northern side of the city, meaning the Assyrian scribes were likely stationed with the military. Compton argues that, from this perspective, the wall in the foreground would be the northern wall of the city, while the southern hill would appear behind it and slightly to the right. The southern hill was likely where Hezekiah was based, as the main water source of the city was in that part of the city.
The Book of Nehemiah (12:37) also describes the Judean king’s palace as being at the north end of the eastern wall of the city. From the north, that palace would be visible on the front left of the southern hill.
All of this aligns with the relief, which shows Hezekiah on a building in the background on the front left side of a hill.
Other findings about Assyria’s relationship with Judah
This isn’t the first significant archaeological discovery about the Kingdom of Judah’s relationship with Assyria made this year.
In October, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced that it had excavated an Assyrian inscription dating back approximately 2,700 years near the Temple Mount.
The inscription, which was on a small pottery fragment that appears to be from the center of the Assyrian Empire, seems to be a tax notice from the Assyrian authorities, demanding payment by the first of the month of Av.
Researchers are unsure to which king the demand was addressed, as the dating of the fragment could place it in the time of King Hezekiah, his son Manasseh, his grandson Amon, or his great-grandson Josiah. The archaeologists involved in the discovery noted, however, that King Hezekiah is recorded in the Tanakh as rebelling against Assyria, and this could have been the context of the demand.
